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As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle,
exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands
linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy.
Bringing itself close to the divine Intellect, becoming, as it
were, one with this, it seeks still further: What Being, now, has
engendered this God, what is the Simplex preceding this multiple;
what the cause at once of its existence and of its existing as a
manifold; what the source of this Number, this Quantity?
Number, Quantity, is not primal: obviously before even duality,
there must stand the unity.
The Dyad is a secondary; deriving from unity, it finds in unity
the determinant needed by its native indetermination: once there
is any determination, there is Number, in the sense, of course,
of the real [the archetypal] Number. And the soul is such a
number or quantity. For the Primals are not masses or magnitudes;
all of that gross order is later, real only to the sense-thought;
even in seed the effective reality is not the moist substance but
the unseen- that is to say Number [as the determinant of
individual being] and the Reason-Principle [of the product to
be].
Thus by what we call the Number and the Dyad of that higher
realm, we mean Reason Principles and the Intellectual-Principle:
but while the Dyad is, as regards that sphere, undetermined-
representing, as it were, the underly [or Matter] of The One- the
later Number [or Quantity]- that which rises from the Dyad
[Intellectual-Principle] and The One- is not Matter to the later
existents but is their forming-Idea, for all of them take shape,
so to speak, from the ideas rising within this. The determination
of the Dyad is brought about partly from its object- The One- and
partly from itself, as is the case with all vision in the act of
sight: intellection [the Act of the Dyad] is vision occupied upon
The One.
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